Granville Strip remains Vancouver’s party-hard central (with video)

Serving it Wrong? Despite laws and a training program, people are still routinely staggering drunk out of some bars

The bleating chorus of one of today’s clunky mash-up hits is briefly overpowered by several sloshed bros in their 20s; they’re having a screaming match, their faces just centimetres away from each other.

The bleating chorus of one of today’s clunky mash-up hits is briefly overpowered by several sloshed bros in their 20s; they’re having a screaming match, their faces just centimetres away from each other.

Groups of hugging ESL students dance and steady their wooziest friends. They slam back tequila shots — selling for just $3.75 — as they enjoy a life away from the prying eyes of their parents back in cities like Riyadh, Seoul, Osaka, Monterrey and Sao Paulo.

Outside, after closing time, young women in mini skirts and oversized coats scramble for cabs as an overserved undergrad stumbles to the nearest alley to vomit up his $1.60 slice of pizza.

Getting blotto with buddies has long been a rite of passage for many young people in Canada. Today, about one-third of all young adult British Columbians report binging — having five or more drinks at a time at least once each month — according to the most recent data from Statistics Canada’s Canadian Community Health Survey.

And some fear that given a lack of police officers and liquor inspectors on the ground to provide oversight — and a weak “Serving It Right” certification program that makes bartenders responsible for how much they serve — controlling the fallout could be difficult.

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Those backing the Clark government’s liquor reform laws often talk about developing a more sophisticated European drinking culture, where mature adults are better able to bend an elbow responsibly with friends.

That type of society may be hard to imagine amid a busy night on the vomit and urine-soaked Granville Strip, where overservice and public drunkenness are a real concern for police trying to maintain control.

Stumbling and mumbling or strutting and shouting — many patrons of the Granville Strip are clearly inebriated once closing time rolls around on Friday or Saturday night.

The Granville entertainment district is the densest collection of drinking establishments in the province and acts as a magnet for young people around Metro Vancouver looking for a night of hard partying. It has grown to 11,200 liquor-licensed seats from 3,400 just five years ago.

Nearby Gastown is also a challenge to police. It’s become a hip alternative for partiers over the past five years with the addition of almost 1,000 licensed seats, for a total of 5,094, according to Vancouver police.

“We do our best to work closely with the bar staff to make sure that doesn’t happen, but it’s a challenge,” Montague said. “Definitely there are some establishments that are more problematic than others.”

In backing the looser drinking laws, Clark announced that in order to “enhance health and public safety” the government would improve and expand Serving It Right — its “responsible beverage service program.”

It will be mandatory for anybody in B.C.’s hospitality industry who sells or serves alcohol, not just those in bars, to take Serving It Right. All servers in the province’s 5,600 licensed restaurants — as well as staff at B.C. Liquor Stores and specialty wine stores — will need to take the Serving It Right test.

But it is unclear whether expanding the program — which amounts to an unsupervised online test — will have any effect on the amount of overservice on the Granville Strip.

Experts warn asking servers to police the amount of drinks they serve conflicts with the profit motive of many of the licensed establishments.

Serving it right

Under the B.C. Liquor Control and Licensing Act, it’s illegal for a bartender to let a person become drunk, to “sell or give liquor to an intoxicated person or a person apparently under the influence of liquor” or to let a drunk person remain on the premises.

Since 1989, British Columbia’s servers have been required to learn these rules and other intricacies of the act as part of Serving it Right.

This program was “very much an initiative of the industry at the time,” according to Tex Enemark, a public policy consultant and deputy minister in charge of liquor regulation in the late ’70s under the Social Credit party.

“A large part of the rationale for that was taken by the licensees themselves,” Enemark said. “Some guy might own a hotel beer parlour, but if something goes wrong, he’s the guy who gets sued, not the server.”

go2hr, the provincial tourism industry’s non-profit human resources association, has overseen the program since its inception. In a news release after Clark’s announcement, go2hr’s CEO Arlene Keis pledged to draw on the success of the current program to “further instil effective skills and techniques for hospitality workers to promote responsible consumption.”

But where the course once took four hours of instruction to complete, now anyone can pay $35, log into the site and answer 30 multiple-choice questions. If they get 24 correct, they’re certified to serve alcohol in the province.

Former bartender and nightclub industry veteran Tyler Popinov says Serving it Right has never really slowed overserving and became even less effective “when it became an online test and an open book — there’s no governing body making sure that that person who’s getting the (test) is actually doing the test.”

“It’s always just been a cash grab by the government and is not necessarily in place to protect staff and or patrons,” Popinov says.

He said the Granville Strip is not built primarily for locals. It’s built for tourists and the suburb,, that’s part of the problem, guys from Langley or wherever come in, get shitfaced, wanna fight and then retreat back to the suburbs.

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Tim Stockwell, director of the University of Victoria’s Centre for Addictions Research of B.C., said studies show that training can give bartenders the tools to stop overserving, but it only works when the “world is watching” and there’s strong law enforcement.

And in B.C., strong enforcement is lacking.

“If it’s put out on a large scale without much oversight they don’t work at all,” Stockwell said of programs like Serving It Right. “It’s usually just the lack of motivation (that leads to overservice) because there’s a strong commercial instinct to serve anybody who comes in whatever the age or their state of intoxication.”

There are more than 10,000 licensed businesses in the province. The Liquor Control and Licensing Branch fined or suspended just 39 licensees last year and 35 the year before for overservice, according to branch spokeswoman Cindy Stephenson.

She added that 36 liquor inspectors — including 10 in the Lower Mainland — monitor the whole province.

Stockwell says these inspectors tell him they are “really stretched” and often don’t have enough access to intelligence, like police files, to properly enforce the law.

“What you need … is a credible level of enforcement,” Stockwell says.

Popinov, a DJ who runs his own professional bartending school, agrees that Serving It Right’s core message of responsible liquor service is at odds with “what a lot of your managers or establishment owners will be pushing upon” a server.

“To them it’s about sales numbers,” he said. “Unless (patrons) are falling down and barfing — where they can’t extract any more money from them — then they’re going to shovel them in.”

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John Teti, co-founder of the anti-gangster Barwatch nightclub program, said it is much tougher now for a licensed establishment to monitor someone’s level of intoxication than when patrons used to sidle up to a bar for several hours at a time.

“If you go back 30 or 40 years, people sat in a chair at a bar and they were served by one server and that server could determine how many drinks they had and could evaluate whether they were intoxicated,” says Teti, who is also a co-owner of the Shark Club.

“In a contemporary bar, no one sits in a seat and there’s six different places to go to get a drink and a whole bunch of different servers. … It’s very difficult for a server to have a relationship with a customer and understand whether that person has had too much to drink.”

Teti says there’s no advantage for bars to let intoxicated people in and that “You’re going to get a lot drunker drinking booze out of a 7-Eleven Big Gulp on the street than you are getting one-ounce shots at the bar.”

That may be true, but those out this week seemed to be having an easy enough time tipping back $3.75 mixed drink after $3.75 mixed drink, some getting fall-down drunk in the process.

Montague says police have an array of tactics to deal with drunken troublemakers, including sending them home in a cab with a friend, fining them for fighting or being drunk or drinking in public, or even arresting them for breaching the peace or causing a disturbance.

“It’s not endless, but there are lots of ways to deal with problem individuals,” Montague said. “But it’s up to the officer’s discretion to determine what the best way is to deal with them.”

VPD tickets for drinking or being intoxicated in public on the Granville Strip have remained steady the past two years after spiking in 2010 and 2011, most likely due to the Olympics and the Canucks’ Stanley Cup Final run.

Still, fighting in both main entertainment districts has increased over the past five years, with the VPD writing four times as many fighting bylaw tickets on Granville and seven times as many in Gastown.

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For the past 17 years, Jens (Spoons) Petersen has been a fixture on Granville Street, relentlessly playing his spoons up and down the strip while cracking jokes and trying his best to defuse tense situations.

In his experience, fights are almost always started by overpossessive boyfriends who “can’t handle their booze.” He says bouncers often “get right in there and try to break it up before it starts.”

“The doormen down here do a helluva job and they have a hell of a job to do,” Petersen says, adding that “if I get people smiling and everybody’s having a good time, then they don’t need to fight.”

When NHL star and Vancouver native Milan Lucic was sucker-punched outside a Granville Street poutine joint early last Sunday morning, members of the VPD’s special weekend unit stepped in to calm everyone down.

An average of six officers patrol the five-block strip on weekends as part of a special “Lima” (‘L’ for liquor) unit. Gastown has a similar unit, usually of about two officers, Montague said.

The units deal specifically with “issues that arise as a result of licensed premises and liquor” — drunks on the street and in bars — so that officers on duty in the rest of the district don’t get “sucked into” calls within the nightlife areas, Montague says.

He says it’s nearly impossible to catch a bar overserving someone without sending in undercover officers, a tactic his department only has the budget to use when dealing with “problem” bars.

“We have to make sure we allocate that manpower appropriately,” Montague says. “Is that manpower better served with plainclothes officers sitting in bars? Or is it better served having them out on roadblocks? Or is it better served having them in uniform on the Granville mall to prevent the problem from happening in the first place?”

Kris Charlebois, who played a gig Thursday night on the strip with his band The Swills, says he tries his best to avoid “the scene.”

“There are people out there that totally abuse the liquor laws, as it is already, and they go out … they get drunk and they start fights,” Charlebois said.

“That totally ruins it for the rest of the people that are out there that want to go out and have a good time. On the strip it happens more than once or twice a night. I grew up in Los Angeles, which is a bigger city than Vancouver and you don’t have that many bar fights. But Vancouver is known for a rowdy drinking scene and that’s what it’s always going to be.”

Popinov says the whole system makes him pose this question: “When’s the last time you were cut off?”

Story Tools

Always colourful Vancouver’s Granville entertainment district where frequent arrests are made by Vancouver police trying to control the many heavily intoxicated partiers. New looser liquor laws and happy hours could mean more problems with the province’s heaviest concentration of drinking establishments.

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